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Possible Reasons Explaining Why the Xbox One’s Voice Commands Only Work in Five Markets at Launch

It has been found in some fine print on Microsoft’s overview page that one of their core selling points for the Xbox One – voice control – will only be available in the following five markets on the day of launch.

United States

United Kingdom

Canada

France

Germany

What does this mean? Well, the other launch day consoles sold in Australia, Austria, Ireland, Brazil, Italy, Mexico, New Zealand and Spain will ship without such functionality. But why?

The exclusion of the other countries could mainly be because the voice commands have not been optimized to recognize languages from those markets. Thus, it would then signify that Microsoft wants to ensure that its consumers receive the best quality/bug free product possible. Or, in other words, why ship something with a function that worked only half the time or not at all?

But then again, some of the excluded markets speak the same languages as the ones that will have the voice commands feature. So, it would only make sense that they are still busy programming the ability to differentiate between accents of the same language. Of course, this is all just speculation and there could be other entities behind that scenes that are delaying the release of the feature.

What do you guys think? Is there something else besides the possibility of optimized voice recognition at play here?

If any more news about the exclusion of this feature surfaces we will be sure to update the story to let you all know! Follow us @maxkoenow for updates when we receive them!

One thought on “Possible Reasons Explaining Why the Xbox One’s Voice Commands Only Work in Five Markets at Launch”

This is a tough rumor to squash. It is not the voice commands themselves that are the issue. Each country/region has to have the software and internet infrastructure in place BEFORE voice commands can work properly. That means servers up and running, the right software for the region, etc. This is NOT trivial as the One is region free.